


Nothing is Worth More Than This Day

by Dustbunnygirl



Category: Torchwood
Genre: AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-12
Updated: 2008-03-12
Packaged: 2018-08-14 08:28:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8005738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dustbunnygirl/pseuds/Dustbunnygirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>...despite everything I’d love to erase, everything I’d pay money to go back to not knowing existed, there’s one very important thing it would kill me to forget.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nothing is Worth More Than This Day

**Author's Note:**

> **Title:** Nothing is Worth More Than This Day (My crap titles, let me show you them)  
>  **Fandom:** Torchwood – RPverse, AU (very, very, VERY AU. Here’s canon over here, on Earth all snug in their underground lair with the Weevils; here’s our AU, CLEAR over on the other side of the universe, waving at its source material fondly. Our Jack isn’t immortal *heh. Yet*or a former Time Agent and Ianto’s never kept a Cyberwoman in the basement and did I mention the organization’s based in San Francisco, not Cardiff and they don’t hunt aliens so much as things that go bump in the night? Yeah, smidge AU)  
>  **Pairing:** Jack/Ianto (so, y'know, slashy)  
>  **Rating:** PGish  
>  **Word count:** 1,516  
>  **Disclaimer:** I own nothing. I’ve borrowed my toys from Auntie Beeb and Uncle Rusty’s toy box and fully plan on eventually giving them back someday, when I’m tired of them.  
>  **Warning** : This was actually written before clips of a certain scene from 2.03 hit YouTube or I’d been sufficiently spoiled to its existence in “To the Last Man.” After viewing said clip (and said episode), all I could say was “RTD stole my brain!!!” So what’s the _opposite_ of being Jossed exactly?  
> 

Jack’s office was dark, the only light glinting off the two amber-filled glasses the muted glow of the antique desk lamp. The creased, yellowed pages were carelessly flung to the corner of the desk furthest from Jack’s sight. If he couldn’t see them, wasn’t confronted with them, the gesture said, maybe he could pretend they didn’t exist. Could breathe again around the solid lump that had settled in the center of his chest since the package from Dublin arrived that morning.

Ianto had found him staring at the fragile pages and the note that had accompanied them. The Welshman didn’t say anything; simply retrieved the pair of glasses and bottle of Scotch from the roll top desk Jack used as a liquor cabinet and poured two fingers of the aged liquor into each. Then he set the glass by Jack’s right hand and settled in the chair on the other side of the desk.

And waited.

Jack leaned heavily back in the chair and let out a deep, ragged breath. Eyes on the wall ahead of him but his gaze settled somewhere – some when – else, he said, “I never could take things slow. Always been too impatient for things to happen in their own time, by anybody else’s schedule or expectations. It’s all about instant gratification. Always has been.”

Being too hard on yourself, the silent roll of Ianto’s eyes said, but he didn’t give voice to the words. Jack had finally started talking. It would only take the smallest interruption to derail him and bring the confession to a halt.

“Estelle wanted to wait. Young, catholic, good family…But you know me.” He grinned, but there was a hint of self-recrimination to the bowing of his lips and disgust clinging to the word when he said, “Eager.”

“Jack…”

“It was the last night’s leave I had before I ended up here,” he continued, as if Ianto’s interruption had gone unspoken. A hint of nostalgia ghosted over his face, wavered at the edges of his voice. “Guess the old Harkness charm finally wore her down. Could’ve been the uncertainty, I guess. You never really knew if there would be a ‘next time’ or a ‘later’ then. Made it easier to let yourself go, convince yourself it was all right to break the rules. Tomorrow, after all, the rules might not exist anymore.”

Jack paused and took a deep breath; needed it to push the rest of the words out. On the inhale he could almost smell Estelle’s rosewater perfume and the scent of her soap that had clung to the sheets that morning. “Nothing was as hard as crawling out of that bed come daybreak and heading back to the base. If she’d begged me to stay just one more time, I would’ve gladly gone AWOL to never leave her or that tiny room ever again. Heaven,” he said, and the nostalgia slipped away, leaving only bitterness behind.

“Instead, I never saw her again. She already thought I was dead by the time she found out she…” Jack gestured to the letter on the corner of the desk as if the words needed to finish that sentence couldn’t make its way past his throat. Ianto reached a cautious hand toward the stack and Jack contemplated the whiskey in his glass instead of the dark eyes darting over the faded pages. He didn’t want to watch the Welshman’s eyes go wide as the letter’s implication sunk in.

Estelle’s letter had been a punch in the gut all its own, but it was the short note on a folded slip of plain white paper that cut him to the quick. The handwriting was concise, neat, lacking the expressive loops and swirls of Estelle’s feminine script; harsh and sharp, nearly, in the way each letter cut into the page. There were no words of salutation, no “Dear” or “To Whom it May Concern” or even a quick “Mr. Harkness” with a short dashed line. “I found this among my mother’s papers recently,” the letter read, and Jack was certain he didn’t imagine the accusation scribbled into each and every word. “The information within it was shocking, but not more so than learning that the man discussed within it – you, Mr. Harkness – appears to be alive and very well indeed after all. I don’t expect that this will be of any worth to you, but it’s of absolutely none to me.” That the “Sincerely” scrawled before Martin Tyler’s signature was truly sincere never crossed Jack’s mind.

Martin Tyler. Eldest son of Mr. and Mrs. George Tyler of Dublin, Ireland. Estelle’s son.

His son.

When he looked up finally, Ianto was watching him with compassionate eyes and a sad smile. The compassion, all things considered, stung.

“You didn’t know, Jack.” Ianto’s words were not question or accusation, nothing but a simple recitation of fact.

“I knew she had a family after I…after I disappeared. Knew she moved on. It never occurred to me any piece of that family could be mine.” Jack laughed, cold and full of spite meant only for himself. “Guess I should’ve done the math.”

“You could try explaining it to him. The circumstances are highly unique and were hardly your fault, Jack.”

“If the man you thought abandoned your mother before you were born came knocking on your door, would you receive him with open arms? Give him long enough to explain anything at all?” Ianto’s silence was answer enough and Jack shook his head. “I just have to accept it. I have a son, a grown son older than I am with kids my age, who will never feel anything but hatred for me.” Jack finally lifted the glass in his hand and slammed back the contents in one swallow. It burned all the way down and, damn it, he wished it never stopped.

Silence enveloped the dark office, closing in around the two men and making the shadows seem all that much darker, the dank underground air all that colder and staler. Jack reached for the bottle to refill his glass, scraping the heavy decanter across the desk to tear the quiet in two. Ianto passed his glass over as well and Jack filled it without looking up, without facing the sympathy waiting for him on the other side of the desk.

“If you could go back…” Ianto finally said, voice soft enough, low enough, to almost be missed.

“Doesn’t work that way, Yan. Door only opens one direction.” Jack’s laugh was bittersweet. “Damn Rip’s like a roach motel: Everything but the kitchen sink can come in, but nothing can get out.”

“But if you could, if suddenly tomorrow you could…” The younger man’s voice caught and he paused before he added, “would you?”

Jack looked up but his eyes never raised enough to meet Ianto’s. He stared at the wall just over his lover’s shoulder instead. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “No I wouldn’t. A man shouldn’t ever know as much about the future as I do now. Be too tempting to try to fix things I think are broken, and God knows what kind of mess that’d make.” His gaze lowered to the glass in his hand and the amber liquid gently sloshing within, ripples moving back and forth across the surface without destroying anything in their path. Some ripples don’t send a man’s life into turmoil, he guessed, before raising the glass to his lips.

“There are ways you could forget,” Ianto said. “Wipe it all away. Start fresh from right where you left. It could be done.”

“Yan…”

“Taken in two doses, spaced a reasonable time apart, you could probably take enough amnesia pills safely to wipe everything before you were sent forward.”

“Ianto.”

“You could go back, start over. Have that normal life you claim would bore you out of your mind.”

Jack rose, forgetting the glass and its contents, the letters, the self-disgust that burned inside him and the misery that had settled over everything like harsh, cold snow. It took him two strides to find himself at Ianto’s side. A heartbeat’s worth of pause to crouch beside the young man’s chair. He looked into the Welshman’s eyes, so full of sad determination, and cupped Ianto’s cheek in his palm. “No, Ianto. I couldn’t.”

“Why?” Jack thought he heard a sliver of hope in the other man’s soft voice and smiled.

“Because,” he said, tracing Ianto’s jaw with the pad of his thumb, “despite everything I’d love to erase, everything I’d pay money to go back to not knowing existed, there’s one very important thing it would kill me to forget.”

Ianto didn’t manage to get a full syllable out in response before Jack leaned forward and trapped the unasked question between their molded lips. He tasted coffee and whiskey on his lover’s tongue, uncertainty in Ianto’s every breath. The younger man trembled beneath Jack’s hand. When he pulled back, breathless and shaking himself, Jack found the question still burning in Ianto’s eyes.

“You. Now. This.” Jack said, and sealed the declaration with another kiss. “But mostly just you.”

*title is a quote from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


End file.
